The country's intricate new rules for voting pose a real risk for its transition to democracy

Members of the military try to stop clashes between demonstrators and loyalists of the ruling military council in Abbasiya district in Cairo / Reuters

When
it comes to revolutions, election law reform is just not as exciting
as, say, toppling a brutal dictator through non-violent protest; nor is
the threat of bad election law reform quite as scary as, for example,
the threat of a military junta taking that dictator's place. But one of
the more auspicious lessons from the past two centuries of democratic
revolutions is that the esoteric details of how a country holds its
first legitimate election can sometimes be just as important, and just
as dangerous, as, for example, whether that country's military decides
to turn its guns on a pro-democracy movement, as it is doing now in
Syria, or to stand them down, as it did in Egypt. That latter country
might have gotten closer to democracy than nearly any other Arab state
so far, but the new election rules it released this week could undo it
all.

The revamped electoral laws,
announced Thursday by Egypt's interim (maybe!) military government, are
a confusing mish-mash of a few different electoral systems. They
include a whole new delineation of 184 districts, voters in which will
choose between, depending on the district, some combination of
individual candidates and party lists. The rules, designed for the
upcoming November elections, which will set the standard for Egyptian
democracy, repeat what may be the biggest mistake that nascent
democracies make: something called "first past the post." It's the
system we use in the U.S., where every election has a list of
candidates, and the candidate who gets the most votes in that particular
election wins the seat. Why is that so bad? It's complicated, but the
video below provides a compelling and surprisingly entertaining (it uses
jungle animals) explanation:

Actually, it's much worse than
that. The video above has "cheetah" winning the national election with
only 20 percent, the most of the seven candidates. The other 80 percent
of the electorate that did not support "cheetah" glumly accepts the
results. But, often, that's not what happens. In a country with little
tradition of democracy and widespread anxiety about whether a democratic
system is really right for them, watching a minority take power can
often lead people to reject the idea of democracy or to consider the new
government illegitimate.

Or worse. The country that no one in
Egypt wants to talk about right now is Algeria. In 1991, Algeria's
government, bowing to outside pressure and internal pro-democracy
activism (sound familiar?), held the country's first-ever real
democratic elections. They set the system as first past the post: voters
in each district chose between a list of parties, and the party that
got the most votes in that district would represent it in the
parliament. But because the democratic system was so new, there were
dozens of political parties, some with overlapping ideologies, few very
experienced in campaigning. Though Algerian society was not particularly
Islamist for an Arab state, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an
Islamist party, was able to use its access to preexisting religious
institutions to campaign and organize. On election day, Algeria's many
liberals and socialists and centrists split their votes among the many
liberal, socialist, and centrist parties. The FIS swept elections,
winning districts with often less than a quarter of its votes. The
Islamist party was poised to dominate the government, though most people
had voted against it. The Algerian military, which is staunchly secular
and socialist, cancelled the elections and staged a coup. The civil war
this started lasted a decade and killed a quarter of a million
Algerians.

We probably don't have to worry about Egypt falling
into civil war if the election produces nationally unpalatable results.
More likely, the military leadership would refuse to cede power and
marginalize democratic institutions into the irrelevant rubber-stampers
they were under Hosni Mubarak. Even if they did honor the results, any
election conducted under these newly announced rules would be unlikely
to produce a government that really represented Egypt. As I've written,
the Muslim Brotherhood is actually not very popular
in Egypt. But they're the least unpopular of Egypt's zillion or so
political parties. They're only showing about 15 to 20 percent national
approval, but that might be enough to win many Egyptian districts, where
dozens of political parties, none of them very organized, are running.

There
are many other democratic systems that get around the problems of first
past the post. Perhaps the most successful is something called
"party-list proportional representation," used by Turkey, Israel,
Brazil, and much of Europe. Everyone votes for a party, and each party
gets seats in parliament proportional to their take in the national
vote. A party that wins 10 percent of the national vote, for example,
gets to hold 10 percent of the seats in parliament. This system isn't as
obvious as first past the post, and it can seem a little
counter-intuitive (voters don't select individual candidates, leaving
that to the party), but the end result is usually a government that more
closely reflects the will of the people.

To compare the two
systems, let's game out how they might work in Egypt. We'll assume that
the most recent polling is accurate: the Muslim Brotherhood will win 15
percent of the vote, Mubarak's old National Democratic Party will win 10
percent, and the rest will be split among a few dozen nascent political
parties, which range from Western-style secular liberals to right-wing
orthodox Salafist Islamists.

In a pure first past the post system
(not quite what Egypt is currently planning, but a rough
approximation), the Muslim Brotherhood will eek out a tiny majority in
most of the country's districts, where it will win about 15 percent of
the vote. The National Democratic Party will also win a decent share of
seats, profiting from name recognition. A few districts in the wealthier
parts of Cairo or Alexandria might elect one of the new liberal
parties. But, in most districts, liberal and/or secular votes get split
between competing liberal-secular parties, meaning most of them lose.
The end result will be a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government, with
factions of the old regime, in a country that doesn't want to be led by
either. Many of the activists who led the revolution become disenchanted
with democracy and don't bother to protest if the military holds on to
some of its newfound power.

Now what's look at what might happen
in a European-style party-list proportional representation system. The
Muslim Brotherhood wins about 15 percent of the national vote, the
National Democratic Party 10 percent; the other 75 percent of the vote
is split about evenly between 10 or so new parties, some of which are
liberal-secular, some of which are socialist, and some of which are
Salafist. In the new government, liberal-secular parties and socialist
parties band together with moderates from the Muslim Brotherhood to form
a ruling coalition, which reflects the will and desire of a majority of
Egyptian voters.

Or there's the Algerian model. If Egypt is going to make the smart choice, the U.S. and other Western governments that lobbied so hard
for Mubarak's departure might want to consider applying the same
pressure now on the Egyptian military leadership. Designing a good
electoral system might not be the most exciting part of a democratic
revolution, but it's by far one of the most important -- and riskiest.

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